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“The best predictor of future behavior is … past behavior” by Karen Franklin Ph.D.
“The best predictor of future behavior is … past behavior”
Does the popular maxim hold water?
Post published by Karen Franklin Ph.D. on Jan 03, 2013 in Witness
Past as prelude. So neat, so clean. So full of certitude. Like a fortune cookie Confucianism. Something you might hear on CSI: Special Victims Unit. A maxim cited by pop psychologist “Dr. Phil(link is external)” McGraw, in one of his many self-help books(link is external).
I’m sure you have heard the mantra. It’s creeping into risk assessment reports and court testimony by forensic psychologists. Sometimes, it’s augmented with incendiary metaphors: The subject is “a ticking time bomb”; he is “carrying a hand grenade and it’s just a matter of when he pulls the pin.”
One current case of mine involves a guy with a cluster of several violent offenses a few years ago, when he was in his 20s. He was using drugs back then, and hanging around with a bad crowd. Plus, he is chronically psychotic. Not a good combination.
But if you predict future violence based on a set of risk factors like his, you will be wrong more often than not. Only about four out of ten of those individuals judged to be at moderate to high risk of future violence go on to reoffend violently, according toresearch(link is external). The low base rates of violent recidivism will be working against you.
Birth of a legend
So where does this idea that “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior” come from, and does it hold any water?
Perusing psychology texts, it appears that the principle has circulated for decades. But as it gained traction, some boiled it down into a simpler, one-size-fits-all mantra. So, for example, the 2003 Complete Idiot’s Guide to Psychology(link is external) claims as an established “psychological fact of life” that, “when it comes to human beings, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Period. End of story.
But this is a gross oversimplification. Psychological scientists who study human behavior agree that past behavior is a useful marker for future behavior. But only under certain specific conditions:
- High-frequency, habitual behaviors are more predictive than infrequent behaviors.
- Predictions work best over short time intervals.
- The anticipated situation must be essentially the same as the past situation that activated the behavior.
- The behavior must not have been extinguished by corrective or negative feedback.
- The person must remain essentially unchanged.
- The person must be fairly consistent in his or her behaviors.
Here, by way of illustration, is a typical study of the phenomenon, involving college students’ class attendance habits:
In a semester-long course, researcher Icek Ajzen found(link is external) that a student’s attendance rate for the first eight sessions correlated 0.46 with his or her attendance rate for the second eight sessions. As you can see, all the conditions are in place: Class attendance is a habitual and routinized behavior, the prediction span is very short, and there is little likelihood of meaningful changes in either the situation or the person. Yet still, the correlation is far from perfect.
Other examples from the classic studies: Frequency of exercise during a given time period is a pretty good indicator of exercise habits in the near future. Ditto for cigarettesmoking and drug use.
But over longer time periods, even high frequency, habitual behaviors may undergo dramatic change. A smoker or heavy drinker might successfully quit the habit. A chronic thief might land a decent job, start a family and settle down.
As this last example suggests, researchers have also determined that the situation plays a critical role in behavior. The situation is often more determinative than individual character traits. Personality theorist Walter Mischel(link is external) – frequently cited in connection with the “best predictor” maxim – suggests that behavioral consistency is best described through if-then relationships between situations and behaviors, as in: “She does A when X, but B when Y.” So, a person may engage in heavy drug use when in the company of drug-using peers, but may stop using when she moves away and gets a fulfilling job.
Forensic psychologists jump aboard
It’s one thing to find a simplistic maxim where one would expect to – in an “Idiot’s Guide” or on Dr. Phil. But it is troubling to see it incorporated in forensic contexts, where the stakes are much higher.
Confusion creeps in when a risk marker is mistaken for an inevitability. It is true that people with a history of violence have a higher likelihood of committing violence in the future than do people who habitually turn the other cheek. Risk is especially acute for those with very extensive histories of violence across a range of situations. But this does not mean that everyone who has committed past acts of violence will continue to aggress forever (any more than someone with no prior violence is guaranteed to remain peaceable forever).
It’s like claiming to know that because your teenage neighbor had a fender bender (or two) when he was first learning to drive, he will definitely crash his car again. He is probably at a higher risk of another collision than is his middle-aged mother, with her clean driving record. But he may or may not crash again. There are many intervening variables – whether he learned from his mistakes, the frequency and locations and times of day of his future driving, his choice of companions, the actions of other drivers on the road, the weather conditions, and so on.
The maxim also conflates all types of violence, and all types of offenders. For example, with detected recidivism among sex offenders falling somewhere between a low of about 3 percent and a high of no more than 15 percent, it’s pretty hard to argue past as prelude. And if we apply the mantra to murderers, as did “Dr. Death” in Texas(link is external), we will be even further off the mark. In California over the past two decades, about 1,000 people have been paroled from prison after serving time for first- or second-degree murder. Their recidivism rate for murder?
Precisely zero, according to Nancy Mullane’s Life After Murder(link is external).
The best-predictor axiom ignores such base rates, which are essential to accurate prediction. If we know the base rate of the criminal behavior we are trying to predict – whether murder or sex offending or general violence – and we know the frequency with which a person has engaged in that behavior, we can use a mathematical formula calledBayes’s theorem(link is external) to calculate a rough likelihood of the behavior’s reoccurrence. (I recommend Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise(link is external) for great examples of the applications of this theory across a range of contexts, from poker to climatology.)
The maxim also snubs its nose at the age-crime curve, perhaps the most universal finding of a century of criminology research. As they reach their mid-30s or so, criminal offenders begin to slow down. Some mature naturally, some go through successful mentorship or treatment programs, some settle down and have families, some make mellower friendships, some simply burn out. Whatever the reasons, as research by Shadd Maruna(link is external)and Sampson and Laub(link is external) drives home, desistance is a virtual inevitability for all but the most die-hard minority of offenders.
This is not to say that the maxim is entirely useless. It may work fairly well under certain limited circumstances, if all of the following hold true:
- We are predicting over a relatively short time frame.
- The individual has a high frequency of violence.
- The violence occurs in a variety of situations.
- The person is faced with the same or similar situations.
- He or she has not been deterred by negative feedback.
- He or she has not changed in any other significant way.
But given lengthier time frames of prediction, our subject and his circumstances both undergo inevitable and often unpredictable changes, and we lose fidelity.
A ticking time bomb fails to ignite
In the case of the report I was reading this week, the mantra was a complete bust. The guy got out of jail and did great. He voluntarily sought treatment and cooperated with all terms of his supervision. By the time I saw him, he was leading a life as peaceable as a newborn lamb’s. In his spare time, he even volunteered to help the needy at his local church.
If the evaluator had heeded the literature on criminal desistance, she might have seen this coming. The fellow had reached the age at which desistance becomes more the rule than the exception. He no longer associated with his old criminal peers. Perhaps most importantly, he had stopped using the drugs that had exacerbated his psychosis.
The past-as-prelude mantra fits with today’s dominant, dark view of offenders as a bundle of perpetual risk factors, ticking time bombs just waiting to explode.
But it doesn’t fit so well with reality.
ESC’s FACULTY SENATE APPROVED A RESOLUTION TO BAN THE BOX
Peace Members and Supporters,
SUNY Empire State College Education for All, would like to thank you for your support. The Resolution, which will give our college an exemption from “the Box”, has taken a positive step forward with the approval from the ESC Faculty Senate. However, the struggle is not complete and it will move forward to the President for Consideration. As soon as additional information is received it will be shared. Once again thank you.
In Solidarity,
Job Hunting With a Criminal Record
There is no dispute that far too many Americans carry the burden of a criminal record — at least 70 million, by recent estimates — or that the easy accessibility of these records in the information age imposes debilitating obstacles, especially when it comes to finding a job.
No Second Chances When It Comes to Housing
Sunday, 15 March 2015 00:00 By Rebecca Burns, Truthout | News Analysis
(Image: Locked out via Shutterstock)Advocates are organizing against what they say is an overlooked civil rights issue: the exclusion of ex-offenders, overwhelmingly people of color, from public and subsidized housing. Many subsidized housing providers employ lifetime bans against people with criminal records, despite a stated commitment to “second chances” by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).After nearly a decade of homelessness, Carter Anderson thought his break had finally come in October 2014, when the City of Vacaville Housing Authority told him that he had been granted a housing choice voucher. Anderson, 30, works a part-time job, but isn’t offered enough hours to make ends meet. He hoped that the voucher, entitling him to rental assistance through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Section 8 program, would change that.
Anderson had already spent six years on the housing authority’s waiting list, but that wasn’t the last barrier he would face: He soon found his application rejected by a string of landlords on the basis of a conviction for drug possession he’d received as a teenager. Under HUD’s regulations, he had just 120 days to find a suitable apartment and sign a lease within the city of Vacaville, California, where he says affordable housing is in short supply to begin with. Ultimately, the voucher expired in February as Anderson scrambled to find an apartment that would accept him, leaving him crushed and back to square one.
“That was 10 years ago,” Anderson said of the conviction that prevented him from securing subsidized housing. “I don’t see why that should count against me. I can’t wait another six years; I can’t even see another six years from now.”
Ex-offenders, who are disproportionately people of color, often face insurmountable barriers in accessing housing.
A new report from the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law says that experiences like Anderson’s amount to an overlooked civil rights issue: Ex-offenders, who are disproportionately people of color, often face insurmountable barriers in accessing housing. While one out of 17 white men is expected to go to prison at some point during his lifetime, the rate climbs to one in six for Hispanic men, and one in three for Black men.
While HUD has a stated commitment to “second chances” for people with criminal records, many HUD-subsidized housing providers are employing lifetime bans on applicants who have been incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, according to the Shriver Center. One Texas housing authority explained its policy this way: “We do not allow people convicted of felonies to live here.”
While federal law requires public housing authorities and project owners to ban applicants who have been convicted of drug manufacturing and certain violent offenses, more prohibitive criteria are imposed at housing providers’ discretion. The report, “When Discretion Means Denial: A National Perspective on Criminal Records Barriers to Federally Subsidized Housing,” calls on HUD to do more to ensure that subsidized housing providers stop perpetuating the cycle of incarceration and homelessness.
Some housing providers deny potential tenants on the basis of prior arrests, even if they never led to a conviction.
In a nationwide review of the admission policies of public housing, housing choice voucher and Section 8 programs, the Shriver Center found a range of problematic policies. In addition to placing lengthy bans on ex-offenders, some housing providers deny potential tenants on the basis of prior arrests, even if they never led to a conviction, or fail to consider factors such as whether an applicant’s arrest record was related to their status as a domestic violence survivor, or other mitigating circumstances. Still others disqualify tenants based on vague or subjective categories of crime. In Norfolk, Virginia, applicants can be rejected from public housing if they have been convicted in the past 10 years of “immoral conduct of any type.”
As the United States prepares for a review of its human rights record by the UN this year, housing advocates are making the case that the exclusion of millions of poor people of color from public and subsidized housing constitutes a human rights crisis.
Breaking the Cycle
At least 70 million people in the United States have some sort of a criminal record, and a bevy of studies show that ex-offenders are more likely to end up homeless, and vice versa. About 20 percent of single adults experiencing homelessness have been incarcerated previously, and of those being released from prison, about one in 10 will experience homelessness in the future. At that point, according to a 2010 study from the Center for Housing Policy, ex-offenders who are unable to find adequate housing upon their release are more than twice as likely to reoffend as those with stable housing.
The case of Keith Landers, an African-American man denied for public housing in Chicago in 2008 as the result of previous arrests, epitomizes this cycle. During 13 years spent on the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) waiting list, Landers was frequently homeless, and racked up a series of arrests for what housing advocates call “acts of living” – charges stemming from sleeping, bathing or asking for money in public spaces. When his housing application finally came up for review, the CHA denied Landers on the basis of these arrests, even though none had resulted in convictions.
“You could be charged as a sex offender for urinating outside, then for the rest of your life you’re ineligible for most types of housing.”
“The most perverse thing about these policies is that they’re all part of this continuum,” said Eric Tars, a senior attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “There are so many laws out there that essentially criminalize being homeless, and if you get arrested, that erects a further barrier to you getting housing. You could be charged as a sex offender for urinating outside, then for the rest of your life you’re ineligible for most types of housing.” In a 2010 review of its human rights record, the United States received a rebuke from the UN Human Rights Council for the barriers to housing placed in front of people with criminal records.
With the help of a local housing law group, Landers filed suit in 2010 to challenge the denial of his application by CHA. An appellate court ruled in his favor, holding that past arrests were not conclusive proof of criminal activity, and could not be used as the sole basis for rejecting applicants.
The case was an important victory, but Marie Claire Tran-Leung, author of the Shriver Center report, says that progress in overturning practices like the CHA’s has nonetheless been slow. She takes heart from the progress made in the employment realm, where a movement to “ban the box” has successfully prohibited certain employers from asking job applicants about their criminal histories in 13 states and 90 cities and counties.
EEOC Blanket Ban Outlaw
“In the employment sector, we’re seeing more conversations about the harmful effects of screening out people with criminal records,” Tran-Leung said. “In the housing sector, we need to do some catch-up.”
A Civil Rights Violation?
Ex-offenders and housing advocates are fighting exclusive policies on several fronts, pushing to expand programs that assist ex-offenders in securing housing and to clarify federal law dealing with the use of criminal background checks in subsidized housing.
Fundamentally, some advocates believe, the policies must be challenged as a civil rights violation: Because people of color are disproportionately represented in the US criminal justice system, admission policies that automatically bar people with criminal records or arrests constitute racial discrimination.
Two recent lawsuits could provide a breakthrough in these areas and spur further organizing.
In January, a Texas county court entered a partial summary judgment in favor of Ana Baez (a pseudonym), a disabled woman who was denied from two separate rent-subsidized complexes. The complexes are managed by the Apartment Management and Investment Company (Aimco), one of the largest providers of subsidized housing in the United States. The problem of restrictive criminal background checks is compounded by the fact that a large number of subsidized housing complexes are operated by a handful of management companies – when ubiquitous landlords employ the same set of prohibitive policies everywhere they rent, people like Carter Anderson may find themselves shut out of most of the affordable housing in their area.
Baez’s applications were rejected as a result of a charge of failure to identify to law enforcement – the act of refusing to provide one’s name or other identifying information to police officers during a lawful stop or arrest, or providing false information – that she had received three years previously. The charge was a misdemeanor, and she had pled no contest to it, but under Aimco’s tenant selection criteria, she was nevertheless barred for life as a result.
“If you have no place to live when you leave prison, what chance do you have to make it?”
The company’s criteria, learned Fred Fuchs, an attorney at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid who represented Baez, consisted of a one-page matrix listing several categories of crimes and a resulting action. All felonies, and most misdemeanors, result in denial. “The misdemeanors that they do allow you to have are strange ones that you almost never see,” Fuchs said. “I have never had a client who’s come in with a past conviction related to a barking dog, or fishing without a license.”
While some areas of federal law do deal with the tenant selection criteria that can be used by housing providers who receive federal subsidies, the law is “convoluted” in the way that it’s written, says Fuchs. A section of US code pertaining to federally subsidized housing providers mandates that their tenant selection criteria must employ criminal history look-back periods that are “reasonable” in duration. But the code neither defines what constitutes a “reasonable” period, nor gives applicants a clear right to contest “unreasonable” policies. The result, Fuchs explains, is that “people have really struggled to figure out how to challenge these policies.”
But in a landmark decision, the Bexar County Court ruled that a lifetime ban on applicants with criminal backgrounds was unreasonable however defined, and ordered the defendants to reconsider Baez’s application and revise their rental selection guidelines.
Aimco has indicated that it may appeal the decision, and told Truthout in a statement: “Aimco conducts criminal background screens on all applicants at both affordable and market rate properties across the country. We believe our system is fair and reasonable and serves the larger purpose of maintaining safe and peaceful homes for our residents. We will continue to educate the court about our process and file appeals where necessary.”
Because Aimco operates nationwide, housing advocates believe the case could strike a blow against large providers that reap profits from subsidized housing while locking out people with criminal backgrounds. In addition to preventing the company from employing blanket bans against tenants with criminal records in Texas, the ruling, if upheld, could leave Aimco’s tenant selection criteria vulnerable to legal challenges in other states, and provide a framework for further challenges against other subsidized providers.
HUD has a legal duty not only to refrain from discriminating, but to “affirmatively further fair housing.”
Meanwhile, a pending case in New York takes the issue of racial discrimination head on. In October, the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that supports ex-offenders in reintegration, filed suit against the owners and management of a multi-unit apartment building in Queens that repeatedly refused to admit its clients. The suit alleges that the blanket ban on renting to people with criminal records is a civil rights violation under the Fair Housing Act – legislation passed as part of the 1968 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in the sale or rental of housing – because such a ban disproportionately impacts African-Americans and Hispanics.
While most legal challenges against tenant selection policies have been leveled at publicly subsidized housing providers and hinged on legal technicalities, the Fortune Society suit is one of the first to directly challenge a blanket ban on housing imposed by a private landlord as racial discrimination.
“If you have no place to live when you leave prison, what chance do you have to make it?” said JoAnn Page, president and CEO of the Fortune Society. “From housing to employment, and from unfair policing policies to education, men and women who return home from prison face unthinkable obstacles at almost every turn in the road. With this lawsuit, we have an opportunity to remove one of the biggest obstacles, and to make it clear that blanket bans on housing for the formerly incarcerated are illegal and will not be tolerated.”
“HUD Needs to Step Up”
Ultimately, fair housing advocates hope to challenge racial discrimination in both the private and public housing markets. The two are related, said Kate Walz, the director of housing justice at the Shriver Center, “because the private market tends to take their guidance from what HUD is doing” in the realms of both criminal background checks and harsh “one-strike” eviction policies. “There’s this perception that [private landlords] need to enact the same type of policies as HUD, because otherwise they’re going to get ‘all those people who are rejected from subsidized housing.'”
HUD has a legal duty not only to refrain from discriminating, but to “affirmatively further fair housing,” Walz said. “They are obligated to assess whether policies they’ve advanced, enacted or permitted have a disparate impact on some groups compared to others. We submit that this assessment has not been done when it comes to criminal background screening. This is where it’s up to HUD to step up.”
In 2011, then-HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan issued a letter to public housing authorities reiterating the importance of “second chances” for people with criminal records and a commitment to “helping ex-offenders gain access to one of the most fundamental building blocks of a stable life – a place to live.”
“The Department is engaged in several initiatives that seek a balance between allowing ex-offenders to reunite with families that live in HUD subsidized housing, and ensuring the safety of all residents in the programs,” Donovan’s letter reads. “To that end, we would like to remind you of the discretion given to public housing agencies when considering housing people leaving the criminal justice system. The Department encourages you to allow ex-offenders to rejoin their families in the Public Housing or Housing Choice Voucher programs, when appropriate.”
But housing activists say this “encouragement” prompted little change on the part of public housing authorities. “They essentially took [the letter], put it in their pocket and continued to deny people,” Walz said.
In response to inquiries from Truthout about follow-up to the 2011 letter, HUD pointed to a pilot program launched by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles in 2013 allowing some individuals who were released from prison or jail within the last year to join the household of family members currently residing in subsidized housing. When asked if the department was planning to issue any further guidance to public housing authorities on the issue of criminal background screening, however, a HUD spokesperson told Truthout that the 2011 letter is “the ultimate decision of the housing authority as to how they deal with criminal background screening.”
While programs allowing ex-offenders to live with family members in subsidized housing “have shown some success in getting people with records into housing,” said attorney Eric Tars, “they would need to be expanded dramatically.” Such programs, moreover, do little to address the needs of those people in prison who don’t have family members to live with, or whose family members have similarly been unable to access subsidized housing.
As the United States prepares for its second review by the UN Human Rights Council in March, the National Center on Homelessness and Poverty Law plans to highlight the lack of progress made on increasing access to housing for ex-offenders, as well as in reducing homelessness overall.
“Only a quarter of people who are income-eligible for subsidized housing actually get it,” Tars said. “The consequences of being convicted continue to last long after your jail term is actually over – the penalties far outweigh the crime, if there even was one. Instead of looking to bring people into housing, we’re looking for ways to get them out.”
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Rebecca Burns
Rebecca Burns, In These Times Assistant Editor, holds an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where her research focused on global land and housing rights. A former editorial intern at the magazine, Burns also works as a research assistant for a project examining violence against humanitarian aid workers.
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EIO – Education from the Inside Out Newsletter
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ESC Education for All, Black History Month Symposium “Education Inside and Out of Prison: Past,Present and Future”
Pictures and video from this amazing event will be available soon!
SUNY Empire State College, Brooklyn Unit, Education for All is pleased to announce an upcoming symposium entitled Education Inside and Out of Prison: Past, Present and Future. You are cordially invited to attend this exciting event. The symposium is planned as a part of the college’s Black History Month’s events and will be held on February 28, 2015 from 9 am until 3 pm.
Our keynote speaker is the Reverend Vivian Nixon, ESC alumna and Executive Director of College and Community Fellowship and co-founder of Education from the Inside and Out (EIO) Coalition.
The day will be made up of a panel discussion focusing on topics such as the history of mass incarceration, the curtailing of prison college programs, Ban the Box, recent legislation and what the future looks like for formerly and currently incarcerated people in terms of education. There will also be heartfelt readings of letters from currently incarcerated people who are not able to access higher education, as well as breakout sessions in the afternoon.
esced4all 