Therapists at the Bridgewater, Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons are advising Bernard Baran, a 36-year-old gay inmate who is seeking a new trial, to have his erections monitored by penile plethysmograph (PPG). Sentenced to three concurrent life terms, Baran has maintained his innocence since his 1984 arrest on flimsy, homophobia-driven charges of child molestation at a daycare center. (See The Guide, December 1999.) The PPG is supposed to reveal a male subject's sexual proclivities by measuring his erections in response to erotic stimuli. This test, notorious for false positives and false negatives, may or may not support Baran's insistence that he has never been sexually attracted to children. Any result could be put to questionable use. Despite the probability that his refusal will have a punitive outcome, Baran is resisting the procedure. Plethysmographs measure volume. They are often used in diagnosing vascular problems or to record respiratory flow. The penile plethysmograph (PPG) or phallometer, known to inmates as the "peter meter," is an instrument that measures the circumference of the penis and notes changes in penile width. Perhaps the one useful application of the device involves monitoring tumescence during sleep in order to tell whether cases of impotence are organic or psychogenic. The PPG test for sexual interest, invented in mid-20th century Czechoslovakia toidentify draft dodgers pretending to be gay (and to keep gay men out of the Czech military), found a home in the United States among therapists who incorporated it into aversion techniques designed to heterosexualize homosexuals. Today it is chiefly used as a diagnostic or forensic test to identify arousal responses to "deviant stimuli." In the US, PPG testing is administered at hundreds of hospitals, correctional institutions, and treatment facilities for sex offenders. It is commonplace in China, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK. In Brussels, the Centre de Recherche-Action en Sexo-Criminologie has used PPG testing since the early 90s. The Utah Department of Corrections has made PPG testing a standard intake procedure for newly imprisoned male sex offenders in order "to determine arousal patterns and establish baseline for future treatment and evaluation." Later, before treatment can be terminated, a plethysmography result showing progress has to be obtained. In Kansas, refusal to take the test constitutes grounds for expulsion from the state correctional system's Sexual Abuse Treatment Program. The device resembles a polygraph or "lie detector," though it is more closely related to instruments measuring blood pressure. Its special feature is a mercury-filled strain gauge that wraps around the penis. This apparatus is wired to a machine that registers response time to a stimulus and traces changes in penile thickness. The object is to chart the subject's apparent levels of interest in females, males, adults, children, coerced sex, and consensual sex. Manufacturers of the device include Farrall Instruments of Grand Island, Nebraska, which responsibly warns users of the danger of false positives. Parks Medical Electronics of Aloha, Oregon, advertises PPG models with names like Penilab V at its website. "If you've ever struggled with penile pressures," the accompanying blurb assures potential customers, "you'll welcome the sensitivity and simplicity of these instruments... the best instruments for studying arterial flow to the penis non-invasively." Just slip this on... Some would dispute the term "non-invasive." A Phoenix, Arizona, sex-offender program funded by the US Justice Department has used the test traumatically on children. Some adults who have experienced the test complain of feeling raped or degraded. In 1999, John Toomey, a British inmate who is not imprisoned for crimes of desire, accused the United Kingdom of violating Article 3 of the 41-nation Convention of Human Rights-- "No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"-- by subjecting him to penile plethysmography. He brought the case before the Court of the Council of Europe, and lost. Some subjects have mainly found the test ludicrous. "It was a farce," says Scott Foster (not his real name), recently paroled from a New England correctional institution after serving time for consensual sex with a teenaged boy. "They brought me to a tiny room where I had to sit in this filthy overstuffed chair with a sheet thrown over it. There was a four-foot-high screen between the guy administering the test and me; he could look over the top whenever he wanted." Foster was asked to lower his trousers, wrap the mercury-filled band around his penis, put on earphones, and listen to a two-hour succession of audiotaped erotic scenarios. The sexual narratives, delivered in a monotone by a male voice with a dese-dem-dose accent ("They think sex offenders sound like that," Foster conjectures), included a variety of sexual situations. Some involved consensual heterosexual sex, some depicted contact with minors, some depicted rape. Foster and others recall simple stories told in simple sentences. "I'm driving down a country road," the voice might say. "It's a lonely road. Nobody's around. Just a boy standing next to the curb. He looks about 14. Blond. Blue eyes. I stop the car. He walks over and says, 'Hi.' This excites me...." In the online magazine PitchWeekly, journalist Allie Johnson quotes PPG scripts that escalate toward rape: "You lady bitch... with skin-tight pants and those boobs falling out of your low-cut blouse. You can't look at me and tease me and not give me something...." One heterosexual convicted rapist who remained limp insists he found the male voice a turnoff. Others complain that sharply different narratives ended and began without a pause. Some say the presence of PPG technicians inhibited them. Foster, who failed to become aroused, remembers the therapist in charge interjecting, "Now, didn't that interest you?" Dr. Barbara Schwartz, a respected clinical psychologist who believes that the PPG has diagnostic value, admits nevertheless that more than a third of the subjects flatline-- i.e., never get aroused. Nothin's up Therapists often interpret flatlining to mean that the subject remains unwilling or unable to acknowledge the reality of his crime-- not that the test might be flawed. PPG proponents recognize that subjects can cheat by masturbating just before the test, interfering with the gauge, or blocking out the audiotapes, but many seem unaware that the test situation itself might inhibit arousal in some subjects, or serve as the primary source of arousal in others. Many men are likelier to respond to visual stimuli than to audio-porn, but the use of visual materials in conjunction with the PPG have largely been discontinued. Until the mid-1990s, there was widespread, non-standardized, occasionally oddball use of sexually explicit videotapes, films, and photographs. In Arizona, children without prior exposure to B&D were shown bondage imagery while hooked up to a PPG, and labeled "deviant" if they responded. Audiotapes avoid charges of inappropriate use of putative illegal images, like confiscated kiddie porn, and of "revictimizing the victims" depicted in pornography-- assuming proof of such victimization exists. The cock makes the man? PPG defenders tend to share particular notions about male sexuality. Testifying about the efficacy of the PPG in North Carolina v. Robert Earl Spencer, a 1993 case in which a man was accused of molesting his five-year-old daughter, Dr. Eugenia Gullick claimed, "It's a one-to-one relationship: we know that when the penis becomes engorged, we are measuring sexual arousal." But engorgement of the penis can be caused by fear, tension, or the factors that produce a morning hard-on. The PPG cannot even determine beyond a doubt that an erection indicates a sexual response. Equating engorgement with sexual excitement reflects the "penis as machine" attitude, widespread among psychologists, that Andrew Kimbrell, cofounder of the Men's Health Network, decries in The Masculine Mystique. "In reality," Kimbrell points out, "the penis is among the least mechanistic of body parts." Because arousal itself can be difficult to trace back to a particular cause, plethysmographic data can also be misleading when arousal does occur. Men who are not sexually interested in children can respond to kiddie porn; some perpetrators of serious sex crimes have difficulty getting erections under any circumstances. No correlation between arousal by a particular stimulus and predisposition to commit a crime has ever been conclusively demonstrated. "Using plethysmography to suggest the guilt or innocence of an alleged sex offender," says Dr. Robert M. Stein of the Center for Neurobehavioral Health in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, "is like using a personality test as evidence of the guilt or innocence of an alleged burglar." Barbara Schwartz stresses that PPG results are useful only when they show "clear, repeated patterns of arousal" that are corroborated by other means. Most state agencies managing sex offenders claim to comply with guidelines formulated by the Association for the Treatment of Sex Abuse (ATSA), a professional organization for clinicians and researchers. ATSA plethysmography standards ("Initial physiological assessments should only be interpreted in conjunction with a comprehensive psychological examination," etc.) are intended to insure that the test is properly conducted, and that its results are interpreted in the light of collateral data. This ethical stance does not always serve as a reality check. Testifying in 1992 before an Arizona Senate subcommittee, Lois Yankowski of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union cited examples of children being labeled offenders or likely offenders primarily as a result of sometimes "heavy-handed and coercive" plethysmography testing. PPG data are frequently thrown before parole boards and cited in hearings determining one-day-to-life civil commitments. While experts agree that plethysmography is useless in pinpointing potential offenders within a "normal" population, some therapists persist in dishing out PPG results as if they could predict behavior accurately. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Read the rest of the article (a few more pages) at: http://www.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=920D1D9F-1742-4FF0-A823131D5B040D35 Included excerpts: "Some question the dedication of therapists employed by the present regime. "The Treatment Center is a way-station for minimally qualified therapists to gain experience at the expense of patients they hate and fear," says Boston attorney John Swomley, who has represented scores of sex offenders. Therapists' biases can be decisive in determining who goes free. "Since there is no confidentiality," Swomley adds, "anything a patient says can be used against him. The aspect of this 'treatment' that is probably most detrimental to a person's sanity and well-being is that working on your problems means pounding nails into your own coffin. In order to embrace therapy, you have to buy into the system and accept its Orwellian doublethink. You have to kiss Big Brother." (...) "A growing number of attorneys and activists consider the partnership of therapists and correctional institutions a civil libertarian nightmare. (...) Plethysmography has had visibility in recent struggles over the rights of real or imagined sex offenders. A principal goal of contemporary sex-offender treatment is that offenders acknowledge their guilt and recognize the impact of their crimes; release in Kansas and other states is contingent upon admission of guilt backed by cooperation with treatment. This presents the wrongfully convicted with a cruel dilemma. (...) "... in the Wonderland of sex-offender treatment, innocent and guilty are enmeshed in a system whose links to reality are disappearing. "It's all gone downhill," says Quaker activist Richard Callahan. "Serious rehabilitation is out. It's all about retribution and revenge, especially toward sex offenders." Yet government statistics show that while about a third of all released prisoners re-offend, recidivism rates for sex offenders are lower in all categories. Writing in a 1992 issue of Medicine and Law, Jerome Miller of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA) observed, "In the current national mood, psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, and others who have traditionally defined themselves as helpers now stand in line to lend a gloss of scientific or clinical validity to criminal justice spectacles often inspired by... political winds, ambitious prosecutors, and pop psychology.... As the politics of crime and punishment in this country have taken a turn for the vicious-- particularly with regard to [sex] offenders... [w]e see the enshrinement of attitudes which are antithetical to authentic therapy." (...) "In this punitive atmosphere, fantasies of unchecked sex predation are fueled and refreshed by media hype surrounding cases like that of alleged child-eater Nathan Bar-Jonah; political and corporate propagandists respond with popular, unconstitutional, soundbite-ready solutions. As long as the corrections industry gives the public what it wants, coercive penis measurements included, sex-offender treatment and criminal justice will remain oxymorons.