School officials learning coercive
interrogations tactics to extract confessions from kids, Posted on March 23,
2015 Written
by rawstory.com
Adult interrogation methods do not belong in the classroom,
so why are school administrators throughout the United States being trained
to use them on their students in order to extract confessions?
John E. Reid & Associates is the largest interrogation trainer in the world
and teaches such methods to hundreds
of school administrators each year. Last month, members of the Illinois
Principals Association, for instance, could register for a “professional
development” event on “Investigative
Interviewing and Active Persuasion”. The School Administrators
Association of New York State recently offered a workshop for administrators
on this same topic, titled “Are you
Sure They Are Telling the Truth”?
These administrators are learning the “Reid Technique”, which relies on “maximization” and “minimization”
tactics in order to induce suspects to confess. Minimization focuses on
reducing a suspect’s feelings of guilt, while maximization is designed to
heighten suspect anxiety using confrontation. Both techniques are legal
and both are incredibly coercive.
Controlled studies of Reid interrogation have documented that while such techniques
may increase the likelihood that a guilty person will confess, they also
increase the likelihood that an innocent person will as well. New research released in February found that the
Reid technique causes witnesses to falsely implicate others.
Reid & Associates itself advises caution when
using the technique on children, especially in schools. In addition to concerns
about the efficacy of principal-administered interrogations are those
involving basic fairness: school administrators are not required to issue Miranda warnings
to children they interrogate on their own (without law enforcement
present), so children are not advised of their rights to an attorney or to
remain silent.
There is already a well-recognized trend of law enforcement coercing confessions from the young
and vulnerable – siphoning them into the criminal justice system. One
example is the Englewood Four
in Chicago. Teenage boys were coerced into falsely confessing to a murder on
the south side of the city, and spent more than 15 years in prison as a result.
Terrill Swift, one of the Four, is my client in a civil suit against his
police interrogators. There are many recent, less-trumpeted cases, where the coercion of youth seems less an
outlier than a general police tactic.
Juvenile coerced confessions share certain hallmarks: use of intimidation,
threats, promises of leniency, and outright lies, so that the youth feel their
only way out is by confessing. Adult interrogators take advantage of the
fact that children are less mature and more susceptible to pressure, and
that they lack the experience to make decisions in their best interest.
Youth in the criminal justice system are more likely to have diagnosable psychological disorders,
and they often fall victim to the “status
differential” — youth feel compelled to answer police questions
because of the officers’ elevated position of power. All of this is why the
young are much more likely than adults
to give false confessions.
Subjecting children to coercive interrogations by
school officials serves no other purpose than to escalate the flow of our
nation’s youth into the school-to-prison
pipeline, a phenomenon by which violations of school rules become
criminalized and children – particularly poor, LGBTQ, black and hispanic
children – are funneled out of schools and into jails and prisons. Not only
does the pipeline lead to higher rates of incarceration but it also results
in economic insecurity.
Rather than training principals to interrogate, schools
should focus on non-punitive approaches like in-school behavior modification,
mentorship, and diversion tactics.
That is the more ethical and community-centered approach.
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